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Part II
New Ideas, New Voices
The seven chapters in "New Ideas, New Voices" were chosen to introduce some of the younger generation of relational writers. In line with the progressive spirit we embrace, the majority of these chapters cover the neglected topics of race, class, and politics as they come to life in the clinical situation.
Opening with Steven Botticelli's (chap. 7) thought-provoking "Return of the Repressed: Class in Psychoanalytic Process" the chapter presents class as occupying a limenal space in our awareness, that which is known and not known simultaneously. Botticelli captures the haunting quality of class and its elusiveness by replicating in the chapter the struggle to capture the manner in which class contributes to therapeutic failure. As with his previous writings (Botticelli, 2004) he forces us to confront the ways in which the political state of the world are inseparable from the relational conflicts in the consulting room.
Anne Cheng (chap. 8), liKe David Eng, has extended the work of Judith Butler on gender melancholia to an understanding of racial melancholia. In "Intimate Refusals: Racial Melancholia and the Politics of Objecthood" she explores the subjectivity of the melancholic object, the racial Other, whose racial identity is introjected in the form of an inarticulable loss that informs white subjectivity. Taking some of these ideas further than initially presented in her book The Melancholy of Race (2001), she calls for a rethinking of subjecthood as a fundamental basis of political action. Formulating an ethics of relationality rather than an ethics of intersubjectivity, Cheng courageously attempts to find a way to go beyond the subject-object construction of racialized identities.
David Engand Shinhee Han (chap. 9), following their seminal work "A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia" (2000), take us into the domain of transnational adoption in "Desegregating Love: Transnational Adoption, Racial Reparation, and Racial Transitional Objects." They impel us to revise Freud's notions of melancholia to include the constructive holding on to lost racial objects, Klein's idea of positions as racial positions, and Winnicott's concept of transitional objects as racialized objects. Their brilliance often lies in the unorthodox interpretation and reformulation of psychoanalytic concepts. Envy is considered by them to be a creative "melancholic racial coping mechanism" that preserves the goodness of the lost Asian mother and allows for some spoiling of the goodness of the idealized whiteness of the adopted mother, a move that ushers in a reparative position for race, where both birth and adopted mothers, Asian and white, can be good and bad.
Continuing the theme of incorporating the cultural into the intrapsychic, Katie Gentile (chap. 10) ventures into the realm of eating disorders. By analyzing 18 years of diary entries of a white, upper-middle class British woman, Gentile struggles with the paradox of resistance and its underlying desire for transformation. Eating disorders are simultaneously self-destructive and an attempt to defiantly resist the social order imposed on the bodies of women. Skillfully, she holds the tension of the diametric oppositions throughout the piece. Only when shifting into a critical analysis of power to explore the many levels in which submitting and resisting co-exist can the analyst appreciate how the body/mind emerges through self-destruction.
Robert Crossmark (chap. 11) presents an innovative chapter, From Familiar Chaos to Coherence: Unformulated Experience and Enactment in Croup Psychotherapy." This is the first chapter to articulate a specifically relational approach to group psychoanalysis. As he takes us into the grips of a group enactment, he shows how the unthought and unformulated aspects of the internal world become enacted in the group, not as formed unconscious material awaiting projection onto the group but that which can only emerge and be formulated through the group experience. The analyst is, of necessity, intertwined in the enactment, looking for the snare to disentangle and using the group themselves to create meaning and shift the dynamics of the enactment.
Returning to class, Stephen Hartman (chap. 12) takes a completely different approach to that of Steven Botticelli, situating class in the body, as he explores the mutual engagement of material and psychic worlds. Titled "Class Unconscious: From Dialectical Materialism to Relational Material," Hartman depicts the unformulated experience of class in the unconscious domain. With theoretical complexity and skill he weaves Marx, Foucault, Laplanche, with Aron, Benjamin, Stein, Fonagy and Target to produce an interesting exposition of his own interpellation into the class structure and the unfolding of class in his relationship to his patients.
In closing Part II, Marsha Hewitt (chap. 13) in "Self/Object and Individual/Society: The 'Two Logics' of Psychoanalysis" explores the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis as a political project in cultivating a democratic mind. Moving beyond psychoanalysis as individual transformation, Hewitt infuses hopefulness into the reader, emphasizing the interconnectedness of subjectivity and social practices. She proposes that relational practices that promote self-reflexivity, intersubjectivity, and mutual relatedness offer the potential for creating democratic ways of social life.
References
Botticelli, S. (2004), The politics of relational psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 14(5):635—651
Cheng, A. (2001), The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eng, D., & Han, S. (2000), A dialogue on racial melancholia. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 70(4):667-700.
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7
Return of the Repressed:
Class in Psychoanalytic Process
Steven Botticelli, PhD
At the mention of class, all progressive heads reverently bow—yet within psychoanalysis, few can think of anything to say about it. About a dozen years ago psychoanalysis discovered gender, and since then journals and conferences have been filled with papers and presentations on the topic. More recently, analysts such as Leary (2000) and Altman (2000) have begun to consider race. Within the family of "gender, race, class, and culture" beloved of a thousand conference organizers, class decidedly has been the neglected child. I think this is no accident. To state my thesis at the outset: Where class appears in psychoanalytic process, it may mark the presence of intractable, perhaps insoluble conflict; of thwarted possibility; of failure— and this is something that we American analysts, in our boundless therapeutic optimism, have difficulty coming to terms with.
Of course, it is not true that psychoanalysis has had nothing to say about class. Freud believed that psychoanalytic treatment should be made available to the poor. His proposal led to the establishment in the 1920s of the Berlin Clinic, where, according to Peter Gay, "indigent neurotics ... were not simply turned over to candidates to be practiced on, but could count, at least part of the time, on being seen by a seasoned practitioner" (Gay, 1988, pp. 462-63). Wilhelm Reich (1934) believed that a psychoanalytically informed understanding of people's minds, especially psychosexuality, was essential in fostering the development of class consciousness among the masses so they could throw off the yoke of capitalism—though he kept this concern quite apart from his clinical interests. Decades later, in The Age of Desire (1981), Joel Kovel tried to theorize the relation between class and mind within the framework of traditional Marxist categories and a one-person psychology.
We might expect that the relational turn in psychoanalysis would open more space for considerations of class to enter, based on some thematic resonances. For one thing, the Marxist definition of class is inherently relational, not simply hierarchical. For Marx, class was a relationship. Eugene Debs well captured this aspect when he said "It's not just that some are rich and others are poor; it's that some are rich because others are poor" (1904, p. 2). Class experience bears a structural resemblance to trauma, that privileged object of relationalists' attention. In both, there is a tendency to blame the self in a situation where another individual, or forces outside one's control, have inflicted injury (cf. Sennett & Cobb's The Hidden Injuries of Class, 1969). Finally, there is a resonance between the relational interest in multiplicity and the idea of multiple subject positions theorized by post-Marxists Laclau and Mouffe (Dimen, personal communication, October, 2003). They believe that expanding the traditional Marxist emphasis on class position to include ethnicity, gender, and other subject positions increases the possible sites of political resistance in fighting for social change (Best & Kellner, 1991).
And indeed, to some extent, it has been the case that under the influence of relational shifts in theory, analysts have become interested in how class enters the clinical picture. Dimen (1994), for instance, considered the implications of therapists' charging for our time in the context of a case in which her patient's resentment of this fact came to play a pertinent role. Altman (1995) examined how perceptions of the class difference between himself and his patients at the clinic of a public hospital became the basis for projective and introjective processes within the dyad. With Dimen and Altman as full participants in the therapeutic interaction, we make the leap into a two-person psychoanalysis. Both authors limn a clinical process that develops out of the patient's (and analyst's) perception of "actual" class markers or the actual class difference between the patient and therapist. Yet I imagine that class also may enter clinical process in ways that do not depend on the presence of such "reality-based" elements.
Here I want to claim a much larger role for class by considering how life in class society creates structures of experience that profoundly shape us and our lived relationships. As Marx wrote decades before any psychologist had formulated a concept of internalized object relations, "the self is the ensemble of social relations" (quoted by Kovel, 1981, p. 70). Though he has often been criticized for neglecting the subjective, psychological aspect of human life, Marx here might have been suggesting that through our experience living in a class society, we develop within ourselves representations of relationships between members of different classes. As with all internalized object relations, these representations carry particular affective valences, and are reversible. The manner in which they become activated in the clinical situation, which member of the dyad takes up which representation, is not predictable in advance, and may shift from one moment to another. Perhaps the first noted appearance of internalized class relations in psychoanalysis in the sense I describe here occurs in the Dora case. Freud, receiving Dora's "fortnight's warning" of the termination of her analysis, felt he was being treated "just like a maidservant or governess" (Freud, 1905, p. 107).
We might expect that these internalized relationships would have a distinctive quality, owing to the peculiar status of class as a social category in American society. Perhaps the most salient characteristic of class is that its very existence often is denied. We are constantly bombarded with the myth that we live in a classless society. American freedom of opportunity allows anyone who works hard enough to get ahead, we are told. Certainly, there are some very rich people, and some poor people in this country, but the vast majority of us belong to a relatively content middle class. Recent statistics give the lie to this quaint notion: Since the 1970s real wages have been declining for 80% of American male workers, the total number of hours worked per household has increased greatly, and the average U.S. household is deeper in debt than ever before (Roy, 2003). Furthermore, the rate of social mobility has been falling for the last several decades, as reduced government spending on higher education and steep tuition increases at universities have limited people's opportunities for advancement (Hutton, 2003).
The mainstream media play a significant role in perpetuating misconceptions about class. For example many newspapers have a business section, but almost none have editors or reporters specifically assigned to cover labor issues, let alone a labor section. This implies that news written from the perspective of business represents the interests of all Americans, and that there are no conflicts based on competing class interests. Where class conflicts are reported, as in strikes and other labor disputes, they are often trivialized by being described as if they were individual relationships gone sour. For instance, when The Chicago Tribune reported on a newspaper strike in that city in 1997, its writer said little about the issues at stake but instead spoke of "the often-overlooked wounds when labor and management can't agree" and the "complexity of emotions" felt on both sides (Frank, 1997, p. 291). Such coverage misrepresents class relations as something other than the structural, irreconcilably conflictual relation that they are.
Sometimes events break through this construction and force into our awareness the fact that we live in a class society. The Enron scandal was one such example: While CEO Ken Lay and other top executives cashed in their stock in the company before it went bankrupt, regular employees lost their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings, all of which was invested in Enron stock. This was on the front pages for all to see. Yet, most of the time awareness of class occupies a space in what sociologist Stanley Aronowitz has called our "class unconscious" (2003, p. 30). Indeed, I want to argue that it is exactly this "known but not known" quality that makes class experience especially likely to be evoked in the clinical situation. Joyce Slochower (1999) puts this idea in the now-familiar language of dissociation: "It is exactly those experiences that belong to split off self states, that remain unintegrated, that are especially likely to be reenacted within the transference countertransference dynamic" (p. 1127).
Despite or perhaps precisely because of this unconsciousness or "split-offness," people often have powerful identifications with their class of origin. My patient Gary is such a person. Gary is a lonely, socially isolated gay man who first came to see me 6 years ago. Despite earning a professional's salary in a midlevel position at a brokerage firm, Gary, for the most part, has continued living an existence more in keeping with his working class background. In his late 40s, he lives in a rented studio apartment. Occasionally he contemplates buying an apartment or taking a European vacation. He usually becomes anxious about what his working class siblings would think about such a purchase, and proceeds to trample all over the idea.
Early in the treatment, Gary got the idea that a sexual and romantic relationship with me would be the answer to all his problems. In fact, this was the only thing he wanted from me. Somehow, he got the idea that such a relationship was not only desirable but possible. Even though on several occasions I explicitly disabused him of the notion that we could become involved in this way, he seemed to see the treatment as a kind of extended courtship that we would eventually consummate in a sexual relationsh...
